A Meter of Rain

[red-beard]

Slow progress in our neighborhood. This is a later satellite photo.

[74-911]

Originally Posted by red-beard

The limit on Flood insurance is $250,000 and that will cost your around $450 per year.

James, that $450 / year is if you are in an area with a very low risk of flooding. In a high risk area I believe insurance can get up to the $2500 / year range. Also, that $450 includes $100K on contents. Per USAA who underwrites my flood, the $250K on structures is for replacement cost, the $100K on contents is ACV.

[JeremyD]

If you are below 9 feet above MSWL (Mean sea water level) - I know folks that are paying over $5K in flood insurance per year.

Mine is closer to $2500 - and I have supplemental flood too...

[masraum]

Interesting. I'd seen previous articles talking about how and where Houston is built being the culprit behind the flooding. This article says otherwise.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/8/30/houston

Excerpt (most of the article except a few quotes from other articles)

It's no unique observation to note that we live in divisive ideological times. Every event, regardless of how tragic and random, is immediately politicized on cable news and social media. We're all guilty, to a degree, of starting with a point of view and then selecting facts to create a narrative to support it. That's human nature, and in a time when we wall ourselves off — physically in our neighborhoods and culturally in what we read and listen to — we encounter few credible counter-opinions from people we respect.

The Strong Towns narrative reflexively applied to Houston is pretty simple: Houston is too spread out, its infrastructure too expansive for its unproductive tax base to properly maintain, and thus it was woefully unprepared for Hurricane Harvey. It they hadn't built all those parking lots, filled in all those wetlands and insisted on driving everywhere, this wouldn't have been nearly as devastating.

That narrative is simple. It's also wrong.

I'm going to remind our readers that I am a licensed engineer and a certified land use planner. I don't generally find it important to note that but the coverage of Harvey is inundated with expert opinions and I'm going to explain why many of them are wrong or are being misinterpreted to fit a media narrative. I've done hydrology and drainage work as an engineer and, as a planner, administered the regulatory process of impervious coverage and managing wetlands.

I would like to summarize the narrative in two parts:

Part 1: Houston was so intent on growth at any and all costs that they turned their city over to developers who filled wetlands and perpetuated sprawling development patterns. (Note: This part is true.)

Part 2: Filling of wetlands and sprawling development patterns are the reason Harvey was so devastating to Houston. (Note: This part is false.)

Many of the articles quoted above, and a lot of the expert claims, come from research by Texas A&M. I'll excerpt from this article that summarizes it most succinctly:

Largely unobstructed either by rules or by natural features such as mountains, the Houston area sprawled. Between 1992 and 2010 alone nearly 25,000 acres (about 10,000 hectares) of natural wetland infrastructure was wiped out, the Texas A&M research shows. Most of the losses were in Harris County, where almost 30% of wetlands disappeared.

Altogether, the region lost the ability to handle nearly four billion gallons (15 billion liters) of storm water. That’s equivalent to $600 million worth of flood water detention capacity, according to the university researchers’ calculations.

Let me affirm: in normal times, this would be cause for serious concern. Wetlands provide natural area for stormwater to collect and percolate. When we fill them, especially when we fail to mitigate that in some way, that water will go someplace else. When someplace else is a parking lot or other compacted or impermeable surface unable to store or percolate the water, flooding will occur. There is a cumulative effect to this so that areas that were never prone to flooding suddenly flood, often in modest rain events that were easily managed previously. Stormwater management is really expensive and often fruitless as, without up front management and planning, you don't really know what is going to happen until the rains comes.

That is how things work in normal times. Houston has experienced some recent flooding events that were certainly made worse by poor land use practices. We can argue over whether or not Houston's regulatory approach is adequate — I'd note that Houston has most of the regulations other major cities have, only they are administered differently (not as zoning, per se) and I'll add that the land use pattern of downtown Houston is good and improving while that of suburban Houston is indistinguishable from what is found in most progressive American cities — but what I've experienced there suggests that it is not much different, in terms of outcomes, to what we see in most of the rest of the country.

Harvey is not normal times. We can't look at this event the way we look at other flooding events. The devastation in Houston from Hurricane Harvey is not the result of the accumulation of many bad decisions. It was simply a huge storm.

The Texas A&M research I highlighted above suggests reckless wetland filling robbed Houston of 4 billion gallons of stormwater storage capacity. For context, the Washington Post is reporting now that Harvey dumped 19 trillion gallons on Texas—a large portion of that hitting the Houston area. That means that, had those wetlands never been filled, they could have accommodated at most .02-.1% of the water that fell in Harvey.

Anyone suggesting that more wetlands or more pervious surfaces would have done anything to mitigate what has just happened is lacking a proper sense of scale.

And that's being kind. To say that Houston is "paying the price for ignorance" and is "drowning from its own freedom from regulations" is the kind of snarky, reactionary rhetoric that's sadly become all too familiar. Wrapping that kind of ideological cheap shot in the veneer of science discredits the meaning of science. The idea that Houston, a city whose residents voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 by the way, should — as one commenter on our Facebook feed suggested — be made an example for others is really cruel. Please stop it.

This is a terrible tragedy. Let's resist filling the narrative with our ideological dogma and instead show Houston the level of generosity and — quite frankly — lack of judgment during a time of need that Houston showed New Orleans a dozen years ago. They'll be plenty of time during the rebuilding to re-examine Houston's development practices. Progress then will benefit from empathy now.

[Heel n Toe]

[slow&rusty]

^^^ Frightening...

[masraum]

The power of water is amazing.

[Jolly Amaranto]

No, Flooding in Houston Was Not Caused By a Lack of Zoning Laws - Hit & Run : Reason.com

[Tobra]

Originally Posted by jyl

I read that, for those without flood insurance, the best they can get is a low interest federal loan. For those with flood insurance, I read typical limits are 25% of house replacement cost.

I think if you are in a fed disaster area, you can write off your losses on your taxes too

[Jim Richards]

Some Houston people make chicken salad out of chicken ****.

[daepp]

Hey Yasin - props for the help you're providing!

I'm curious, this may be a dumb question, but if the water only rises say 3-4 feet, what happens to the upper floors? Will they become habitable before the first floors are repaired?

[Instrument 41]

There were many folks here that lived upstairs while they were rebuilding downstairs.

[Jolly Amaranto]

Life along the Brazos
Historically the Brazos River has flooded many times. Back in the 1800s and early 1900s it would combine with Oyster Creek and the San Bernard River to become one vast flood plain. This 1900 era photo shows the old Imperial Sugar Mill in Sugar Land in the background as the flood water pours over the Southern Pacific railroad tracks of the Sunset Route.

As Houston grew, the suburbs expanded to the southwest and the old farmland along the Brazos was developed. The developers created Levee Improvement Districts (LIDs) to protect the properties. The LIDs were each responsible for maintaining their own levees, flood gates, storm water pumps and a system of storm water canals or ditches to receive the runoff from the storm sewer system. Over the years a mosaic of LIDs have sprung up across the flood plain.

The canals all feed into a large ditch that flows through the flood gates into the Brazos. When the Brazos is at flood stage, and the storm water can no longer flow by gravity, the gates are close and the pumps take over. The pump capacity is nowhere near that required to drain the canals during an epic rainfall event but were considered sufficient to keep the water out of homes and businesses. The storage capacity of the canals, lakes, greenbelts, golf courses and eventually streets, was deemed enough. However the canals and storm water sewer system worked in reverse in many cases. The water from all over the LID flowed to the lowest spot or sump in the area, flooding entire neighborhoods. It was not common knowledge before Harvey as to where these sumps were, but we all know now. Fortunately my home was not in one. Here is the main canal that flows to the flood gates and pumps in my LID. It is down to normal level now.

Here is how high it was on August 29 as seen from a friends back door.

[masraum]

Very interesting info, Jolly. Thanks for posting.

[Seahawk]

Originally Posted by masraum

The power of water is amazing.

Water is merciless and doesn't care. Water is Kraken.

Originally Posted by masraum

Very interesting info, Jolly. Thanks for posting.

It is. Is there a fix?

[kach22i]

Thanks to all posting photos and videos, really takes measure of the situation.

[Jolly Amaranto]

Originally Posted by Seahawk

Water is merciless and doesn't care. Water is Kraken.



It is. Is there a fix?

In the case of the Levee Improvement Districts, there is a fix. More pumps to add to the capacity of storm water discharge. And vigilant maintenance of the levees. One levee along the Brazos did fail down in Brazoria County during this event. People will be more likely to approve any bond issues proposed to by the LIDs to add pumps and increase water retention volume. We approved a bond for our LID to raise our levees 2 feet and widened the main ditch in the last 10 years. Glad we did or it could have been much worse here. Now we could use more pumps. As for the problems up along Buffalo Bayou and the Addicks/Barker Reservoir to the north of here, there are major roadblocks. Rampant development of the upper regions within the flood pools of the reservoirs and the limited amount of water that can be released without flooding vast stretches of Houston are just some of them. The opportunity to install massive conduits under Interstate 10 to provide extra outflow from the reservoirs before the highway was rebuilt a few years ago was shoved aside for political reasons and lack of funding. That would have been much easier and less expensive than digging a huge tunnel to do the same thing now.

[jwasbury]

Reading through this thread gives me deja vu, and a bit of heartburn. Lived through severe flooding from Superstorm Sandy. We had flood insurance as it was required for the mortgage, but many of my neighbors did not. We repaired things properly, but it was a mess and 5 years on I still find tools or other items that are rusted and ruined from the flood (or I can't find things that I recall having, because I chucked them in the trash cleaning up from the flood). My next door neighbor being a cheap azz didn't replace electrical components that had been submerged in salt water. A few years later, we awoke in the middle of the night to the fire department banging on our door because of a smoke condition next door. They found a small electrical fire in the wall...beneath the flood level of course.


Never, ever, ever, ever want to live through that again. Now live 200 feet above sea level.

Good luck to all who are impacted by this.

[red-beard]

Originally Posted by Seahawk

Is there a fix?

Yes. Add more dams and levees, not quite so locally focused, and put in a better way of draining the water in a controlled fashion (BIG conduit/culvert).